Friday, October 26, 2012

Source in SF! (VEGAN MOFO: DAY 26)

I decided to hit up Source, a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco's Design District, which is an area of the city I definitely would not have gone to otherwise. Fellow blogger Jenny Bradley of The Effervescent Vegan (who also regularly writes for the always-witty and informative site Vegansaurus) was kind enough to reach out to me and encourage me to come to Source, where she makes crazy desserts (we'll get back to them). Luckily, my friend Sara works in the Design District, so we got lunch there yesterday,

This place has an incredible menu. I could have eaten just from this one place all week and not gotten sick of it. I get so overwhelmed trying to decide and usually go with the first suggestion I hear, because I want to eat all the things. Can you imagine getting a cookbook and only being able to make one entree and one dessert from it? What torture! How could you ever decide? That's what eating at a restaurant like this only one time is like. But, listening to my preferences, Jenny suggested I try the Green Curry Veggie Dosa, omitting the rice inside it. Actually, there isn't even rice listed in the description, but she works there, so if she says it originally had rice before I asked for its omission, I believe her.

So, I don't know if dosas are a California thing or what, and I don't know if they're always huge, but this was HUGE. I mean, see that cup of green sauce? That's in one of those tiny dipping cups, just so you can compare here. This baby was filled with refreshing veggies, of which I tried very hard to take a good picture.

Mmmm, I'm really too hungry right now to be writing this post. I want to be eating this again.

Sara got a classic Sara thing. She prefers cold food--salads with grains and greens and she's really into beets and avocado. The Tri Colored Quinoa she got was so beautiful, check it out.

What a delicious work of art, don't you think? It's almost too pretty to eat. But we ate it alright, and it was perfectly fresh and veggie-licious. And speaking of veggie-licious, I also got the Fresh Pressed Organic Super 8 Juice, which the menu points out is of the "highest nutritional value."

This was seriously the best veggie juice I ever had. It was just delicious. I cannot explain it. I recognized in it the same veggies other juices might use -- beet, carrot, parsley, apple, ginger -- but for some reason this one tasted the best ever. Besides the things I just listed as things I could taste in it, it also had kale, cucumber, and celery. Drinking vegetables is awesome. I say this every time I bring up juicing on my blog, but it just is. It's amazing. If you can do it, you should.

OH MY GOD, IT'S TIME TO TALK ABOUT DESSERT. Jenny brought us three desserts to blow our damn minds. First, this raw Living Cheesecake cup, which was just out of this world.

Please let me eat this every day? Please?

But wait, there's more! So, Jenny told me that Source is owned by people who are from out East, and this is why they've decided to recreate the childhood junk-food favorites of those who dwelled anywhere some 300 miles out along the Atlantic coast: Twinkies, Devil Dogs, and Snowballs. I know that Jenny actually makes the Twinkies herself, and she made that Cheesecake above, but I'm not sure if she makes the vegan versions of the other two.

I never had a Snowball (not pictured), but I definitely ate my fair share of Devil Dogs as a child. I wasn't a big Twinkie fan, but this is no ordinary Twinkie. It's way, way better. Instead of being totally spongy and made from a million bizarre processed ingredients, this has a bit more heft and a richer taste. It's still got that signature sponginess, but it's more, I dunno, REAL. I mean, it's hard to explain the fakeness of real Twinkie, but I think most people know what I mean. This fake Twinkie has all the realness of grandma's oven, you got me?

Onto the Heaven Dog (get it???). Now, OK, obviously, they did not recreate a Devil Dog exactly. Instead, they decided to make it way better by drizzling chocolate all over it! YEAH. The shape is kinda odd. I mean, the original Devil Dogs have thinner chocolate cakes on the top and bottom than this has. The cakes of this are so thick that it has to lay down on its side! There is cream in the middle still. It doesn't even need the cream, though, although I understand that it is required to make this an imitation of a Devil Dog. Every aspect of this took me into junk food paradise. I could remember sneaking these things from the laundry room of my parents' house when I was young and they hadn't yet realized that it's OK for type 1 diabetics to eat sugar. Except that I used to always regret that it wasn't worth the risk just for the crappy, dry, original Devil Dogs, and eventually I decided to stick with sneaking those Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies (uhhh, Source, y u no have those??). But these Heaven Dogs are worth it with the sneaky sneaky. Only I need not sneak, I can enjoy these vegan treats in the open! Isn't adulthood grand?

Vegan bloggers, nerding it up with vegan pastries.

Oh, you want to see something else? I love the sign that Source has up outside.

"Organic food that loves you"! How sweet! I love you too, organic food.

About Me

My name is Melissa and I moved to Oakland, California in 2013 after having spent my entire life prior to that in Pennsylvania.

This blog has moved with me from Phoenixville, PA to Pittsburgh, PA to San Francisco, CA to Oakland, CA. It is a blog about my passionately vegan life, including vegan events I attend, food I cook, restaurants I visit, and more. It is also about many environmental issues, but overfishing in particular. Another frequent topic is type 1 diabetes, which I have lived with since age 8.

When I first started this blog, I was not yet fully vegan and I had a lot of loathing in me. I suffer with far less loathing now, but I've kept my blog title, as I'm used to it and it makes me sound all literary and clever and stuff.